EAT HOT DEATH, CABLE TV!
(C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz
It is my privilege to live in Irvine, CA with my sweetie and a
prohibition against erecting a TV antenna within the city limits.
TV arrives at each home in an ecologically sound (underground
cable) and dialectically pure (no Mexican stations) process for a
mere $25/month. You could pay a little less and get only eight
stations, or pay a lot more to see female nudity and bleeding
heart liberalism graphically unscrambled before your eyes. The
static generously decorating all stations is added free of
charge, courtesy of Dimension Cable Co. You could erect a
satellite dish and view what you please as long as you did it in
the barbarian hinterlands of Tustin. When the Irvine Company
runs a monopoly, it stays a monopoly. If you want democracy,
move to a ZIP code where junk mail says K-Mart, not Buffums.
The recent cable rate increase attendant to the continuing decay
of picture quality frosted me. My officially mandated inability
to view the Brazilian bombshell Xuxa on KMEX children's TV
marching with a coterie of Nabokovian nymphs, knees thrust high
beneath their miniskirts, long leather boots clinging to their
calves... pushed me over the edge. I was mad as hell and was not
going to take it any more! I remembered those dizzy days of my
youth when I stripped the ends of an extension cord and plugged a
dormitory phone system into the wall socket. Given that phones
operate at 28V DC and wall sockets dispense juice at 120V AC, my
displeasure was overwhelmingly recognized by the university
though I chose to remain anonymous.
I am more mature now, and fiber optic cable conducts modulated
monochromatic near-infrared light, not amperes of electricity. I
therefore sought out a similarly enraged acquaintance whose
passion it was to dabble within the sub rosa world of digital
electronic hacking. He unscrambled satellite feeds, eavesdropped
on Pentagon conversations, and jammed police communications
whenever they found a new donut shop. He said it would be easy.
We started with one of those New Age biofeedback units. It fed
through an operational amplifier cascade, a carrier wave
oscillator and super-heterodyne modulation mixer, and a ten
kilowatt traveling wave tube amplifier spliced into the power
lines preceding my meter. (Paying for ten kilowatts each hour
was outside our budget.) My hacker rigged a few dozen repeater
units with massive infrared laser diodes spliced into cable
access boxes throughout Irvine. It took a few weeks, but we
persevered. Many local companies manufacturing the most esoteric
Pentagon MIL-Spec electronics came up short on inventory and
wrote it off budget as Desert Storm losses. We were ready.
As we affixed silver chloride cerebral leads to my scalp with
electrode paste the fellow remarked that though he had carefully
constructed his parts list and the assembled equipment therefrom,
he had dozens of 220K resistors left over. We flipped toggle
switches and rocker switches and dials as a sensuous electronic
hum inflated within the room. The sun set upon the Irvine masses
returning home from work to sit down before their TV sets. My
spirit was about to ride ten kilowatts of power straight into
their desiccated, family-valued Republican minds.
With my finger poised upon the first stage pre-amp toggle I
roused the full force of my ponderous intelligence to vividly
fantasize buggering Flipper. I popped the switch just
microseconds before my co-conspirator screamed,
"I forgot the limiting resistors on the op amp feedback loops!"
As near as we can reconstruct it, the pre-amp launched into an
exponential spiral before it melted, said puddle of copper and
silicon occurring after it shoved its best into the main amps.
The main amplifier bank exploded just after its awesome output
pulse detonated the traveling wave tube, whose nominal ten
kilowatt rating was probably exceeded a thousand-fold in the
fractional second before the power lines blew off their
insulators at the house junction. The dozens of repeater units
Roman-candled as their laser diodes were driven into quantum
mechanical places unvisited since the Big Bang. Fiber optic
bundles gorged with photonic glut as a hundred miles of
underground cable blasted molten silicate into the air like
detcord gone insane. Detcord propagates at Mach 25. We were
riding lightspeed as Flipper writhed and bucked and screamed.
I could spin tales robust with boasts of derring-do and other
obvious fabrications. I could intimate that thousands of Irvine
residents snuggled upon their couches before their wide-screen
projection TV's that night tore out their own eyes in agony and
descended into irreversible screaming insanity. I think that the
Irvine World News that Thursday best summarized the whole affair:
"IRVINE TV CABLE RECEPTION STILL LOUSY. CABLE COMPANY CONTINUES
TO INVESTIGATE"